Patent landscape analysis: how to map a technology field

What a landscape is for

A landscape does not say whether you can patent something or whether you infringe. Those are the jobs of a patentability search and a freedom-to-operate search. It answers strategic questions about a whole field, and the question decides the dataset, the metrics and the charts.

A smaller cousin is the state-of-the-art search: the 20 to 50 most relevant documents in a field, read and summarized, without statistics. It is often the first phase of a landscape, and on its own it is a good way for a new R&D team to learn a field.

Building the dataset

Write a scope statement first: what is in, what is out, the date range and the jurisdictions. Then build the query from two parts.

• Classification. The Cooperative Patent Classification, shared by the EPO and the USPTO and compatible with the WIPO's IPC, is applied by examiners and catches documents that use unusual wording. Use IPC when you need older or wider national coverage that lacks CPC codes.
• Keywords. Classification groups are rarely an exact fit for a business question. Combine them with keywords and synonyms in titles, abstracts and claims, to add documents classified elsewhere and to cut noise inside broad groups.

Then test the query. Read a random sample of 50 to 100 hits and count how many are on topic: that is your precision. Collect a set of documents you know belong, for example from competitors' product pages or a review article, and check how many the query finds: that is your recall. Adjust and repeat. A landscape with 60% precision will have charts that are 40% noise.

Where to get the data:

Cleaning: where most of the work is

1. Group into families. One invention filed in the US, at the EPO and in China is one family but three or more documents. The EPO's DOCDB simple family groups documents with the same technical content; the INPADOC extended family is wider and links documents through any shared priority. Pick one, use it throughout, and say which.
2. Normalize applicant names. "Acme Corp", "ACME Corporation", "Acme Inc." and the Japanese subsidiary are one player. Build a lookup table, and decide whether to roll subsidiaries and acquisitions up to the parent.
3. Fix the date field. Use the earliest priority date of the family for trends. WIPO's guidelines discuss the trade-offs between application, priority and publication years; whichever you choose, label it on every chart.
4. Remove noise. Read the titles of the largest clusters and of the top applicants' families. Off-topic documents tend to come in batches from one broad code or one ambiguous keyword.
5. Tag sub-technologies. Either by CPC subgroup, or by reading and tagging, or by clustering on text. Hand-tagging a few hundred families is often the most valuable part of the whole project.

Metrics that matter, and their traps

The 18-month publication lag

US applications are published promptly after 18 months from the earliest filing date claimed (35 U.S.C. 122(b)), and European applications after 18 months from filing or priority (Art. 93 EPC). Some US applications are never published before grant: applicants who will not file abroad can request nonpublication, and provisional applications are not published at all. The result is that any chart by priority year falls off a cliff in the most recent two years. WIPO's landscape report guidelines warn that this dip is often mistaken for falling interest, and suggest marking the incomplete period with a line and a note rather than deleting it. Do that, and say so in the text.

Visualizing the results

• Trends: a line or bar chart of families per priority year, with the incomplete years shaded.
• Players: a horizontal bar chart of the top 10 to 15 applicants, sorted, with family counts labeled. Avoid pie charts with 20 slices.
• Applicant by sub-technology: a heatmap or matrix shows who focuses where, and the empty cells are your white-space candidates.
• Geography: a table or map of filing countries per applicant.

Every chart should state the data source, the query date, the counting unit (families or documents) and the date field. Without those, nobody can reproduce or challenge it.

Worked mini-example: sodium-ion batteries

A battery start-up wants to know whether to focus its patent effort on cathode materials or electrolytes, and which companies to watch. The numbers below are illustrative, not real counts; they show how to read a trend chart, not what the field looks like.

The query starts from CPC H01M 10/054, "accumulators with insertion or intercalation of metals other than lithium", combined with keywords such as "sodium ion", "Na-ion" and "sodium battery". That group also covers magnesium and other metals, so the keywords do real work. A 100-hit sample is read to check precision, and the start-up's own reading list of 30 key patents is used to check recall. Results are grouped into DOCDB families, applicant names cleaned, and families tagged as cathode, anode, electrolyte, cell design or other.

Read naively, the table says the field peaked in 2023 and is collapsing. It says nothing of the kind. With the search run in October 2026, families first filed in 2025 have mostly not published, and many 2024 families are still missing. The honest statement is: steady growth from 2019 to 2023, with 2024 and 2025 incomplete. If the start-up then finds that cathode families make up most of the growth while electrolyte families are few and spread across many small applicants, that is a lead worth checking with a state-of-the-art read of those documents, not a conclusion on its own.

More patent guides

• Patent drawing requirements: USPTO, EPO and India

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• How to write patent claims: USPTO, EPO and India

  Claim structure and worked examples, then the claim rules and fees at the USPTO, the EPO and the Indian Patent Office, side by side.

• Types of patent searches, and which one you need

  Patentability, freedom-to-operate, invalidity and landscape searches compared by purpose, timing, scope and deliverable.

• Patentability search: how to check novelty before you file

  What counts as prior art under 35 U.S.C. 102 and Art. 54 EPC, the grace period gap, search steps and how to read results.

• Freedom-to-operate search in the US and Europe

  In-force claims only, legal status checks at the USPTO, EPO and UPC, FTO opinions after Halo, and design-arounds.

• Invalidity search: prior art to challenge a patent

  IPR, PGR, EPO opposition and UPC revocation deadlines, prior art dates, standards documents and claim charts.

• Google Patents search guide

  Search operators and fields, Boolean and proximity syntax, non-patent literature, and where Google Patents falls short of the official databases.

• The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC), explained

  How CPC symbols are built, CPC against IPC, the Y section, how to find the right class and how to search it in each database.

• Patent search Boolean operators and search strings

  Boolean, proximity and truncation syntax compared across Patent Public Search, Espacenet, Google Patents and The Lens, with semantic search for contrast.

• The PCT application: timeline, fees and national phase

  The international phase month by month, receiving Office and ISA fees in CHF, USD and EUR, national phase deadlines by office, and a deadline calculator.

• How much does a patent cost?

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• How long does a patent last?

  US utility and design terms, patent term adjustment and extension, terminal disclaimers, maintenance fee deadlines, Europe and India, with an expiry estimator.

• Can AI write a patent application?

  What AI drafting does well and badly, the USPTO and EPO positions on AI tools, AI inventorship after 2025, and confidentiality.

All guides, by patent office